Anthropic on Thursday moved to bar users from treating its Claude AI system with needless cruelty, amid a growing philosophical debate over whether artificial intelligence can be conscious.

The San Francisco-based AI lab updated its usage policy to include "a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models."

"Claude's ability to end these interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism," the policy states.

The updated policy does not explicitly cite so-called "model welfare," the idea that AI systems might deserve types of protection usually reserved for living things, but Anthropic and its executives have openly entertained the concept.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Already last year, the company said it was giving Claude the ability to end conversations in rare, extreme cases of "persistently harmful or abusive user interactions."

Then in February, CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times he was unsure whether AI models could be conscious.

"We don't know if the models are conscious...But we're open to the idea that it could be," Amodei said.

Science fiction and popular culture have been fascinated for decades by the boundary between technology and human intelligence, but asking whether AI is conscious may be the wrong question, according to Jackson Stakeman, a general manager at Sparq, an Atlanta-based AI services provider.

"Consciousness is a trap. We can't prove it in each other. Debate it for AI and you go in circles," Stakeman told AFP.

"The mirror is a better metaphor. These systems reflect what we put in, at scale. That's reason enough for the policy change" at Anthropic, he added.

Some have rejected the idea of machine consciousness outright, including Pope Leo XIV and Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman.

"AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer," Suleyman wrote in an essay last month.

"Granting rights and moral protections to a technological entity, one that looks to be on a path to be seismically more capable and intelligent than us, is a recipe for disaster," he wrote.

In a sermon delivered in Italian on Thursday at St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, the pope suggested machines lack a soul, saying they merely "compile data" quickly.

"The mind must not simply compile data -- as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can," the pontiff said.

It must "recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences," the pope said.

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